Arthur Rimbaud and Yves Bonnefoy.
Two Poetics of the Imagination, by
Ricardo Nirenberg.

(This is roughly speaking a translation, from the original French, of a
talk given at Peyresq, in the Alpes de Haute Provence, France, in July 2005,
to the Société d'Etudes Benjamin Fondane. The translations
of Rimbaud's and Bonnefoy's poems are mine.)

To start speaking of what Rimbaud has meant for the poet
Yves Bonnefoy and a start is all we can hope for in this short time
let us try to go directly toward what is essential: let us re-read one
of the texts in the Illuminations, the one titled, simply, "Conte":

Story

A Prince was annoyed at
never having applied himself to anything other than to perfecting
ordinary generosities. He foresaw amazing revolutions in love, and
suspected his women of being capable of something better than a consent
spiced with heaven and luxury. He wanted to see Truth, the moment
of essential desire and of essential satisfaction. Whether or not
this was a pious aberration of his, he wanted. He possesed, at least,
a good measure of human power.
All the women he had known were slaughtered. What havoc in the garden
of beauty! Beneath the saber, they blessed him. He did not order new
ones provided. The women reappeared.
He killed all his followers, after the hunt or the carouse.Still,
all followed him.
He amused himself in cutting the throat of his pet animals. He had
his palaces burnt down. Hurling himself on the people, he hewed them
down to pieces.The people, the golden roofs, the beautiful animals
kept on existing.
Thus can man achieve ecstasy in destruction and become younger by
cruelty. The people did not complain. Nobody offered an opinion.
One evening he was galloping proudly. A Genie appeared, of a beauty
ineffable, even unavowable. His face and his demeanor held the promise
of a multiple and complex love. Of a happiness unutterable, even unbearable.
The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other, probably in their
essential health. How could they not have died as a result? Together,
therefore, they died.
But this Prince passed away, in his palace, at a normal age. The Prince
was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince.
The music of reconciliation eludes our desire.

There are numerous interpretations of this "Story,"
and they go from the experiences of poetic genius to those of gay love,
but I wish to propose the elements of a reading, as evident to me as I deem
the others deficient, which makes this text of Rimbaud into a fable about
the powers of the image and of imagination, a fable ending in defeat, lack
and desperation. A defeat, a lack and a desperation which later on will
open up the promise of salvation at the heart of Bonnefoy's poetic practice.

To mention violent images and a violent imagination in
connection with Rimbaud is nothing new. Hugo Friedrich wrote that "The
Illuminations are the first great building of the modern imagination,"
(Hugo Friedrich, Structure dela poésie moderne,
trad. Par M.-F. Demet, Le Livre de poche, 1999, p. 117 ; appeared in German
in 1956). But it is rather surprising that the Freiburg professor remained
blind to the allegorical contents of Rimbaud's "Story," probably
because he was focusing too exclusively on structure at the expense of
the matter at hand (loc. cit., page 117). The more surprising because
the powers of imagination constituted a great theme for 18th- and 19th-century
poets.

Up to the 18th century, imagination was, for the most
part, as in Locke or Leibniz, just a contrary of realityfantasy,
dream, lie. Now it becomes a great power: the power of making present
that which is absent. We find that definition first in Joseph Addison
("Pleasures Of Imagination," Spectator, no. 411, June
21, 1712), and perhaps there is some poetic justice in that it was a proto-journalist
who came upon it. We find the same definition later in Wilhelm von Humboldt
(Über Göthes Herrmann und Dorothea, 1798, III.): in those
eight or nine decades, though, the sense of that phraseto make present
that which is absentunderwent a profound change. For Addison, the
imagination is a source of pleasures stronger and purer than those of
the body and the senses: "For by this faculty (the imagination) a
man in a dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes
more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature."
Humboldt, on the other hand, defines Art in terms of the imagination:
"Daher ist die Kunst die Fertigkeit, die Einbildungskraft nach Gesetzen
productiv zu machen" (Art is the faculty of making imagination productive
according to rules.)

The Romantic poets carried this much farther: not only
was the imagination the only source of the arts, but it is now the divine
part of our human spirit; our shekhina, if you wish. Thus, long
before Baudelaire called it "Queen of Faculties," Coleridge
privileged imagination above all else (Biographia Literaria, 1817,
Chapter XIII), and even more eloquently, Wordsworth sang the imagination
in that poem, The Prelude, that is his autobiography or his Bildungsromanin
any case, the recreation of his childhood by means of his imagination
:

that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own.
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe:
They from their native selves can send abroad
Kindred mutations; for themselves create
A like existence; and, whene'er it dawns
Created for them, catch it, or are caught
By its inevitable mastery,
Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound
Of harmony from Heaven's remotest spheres.

(The Prelude, 1805, Book XIV.)

In Wordsworth, imagination makes us (at least those of
us who have a "higher mind") into angels, and the harmony of
the celestial spheres, the music of reconciliation, Rimbaud's "musique
savante", does not elude our desire. Imagination is the necessary
secret for a universal love, what Rimbaud calls "le Génie."
Similarly Wordsworth writes farther on in The Prelude:

This spiritual Love acts
not nor can exist
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.

This supreme exaltation, this apotheosis of the imagination
carried out by the Romantics could not last long; the Angel and the Prince
fell from heaven: how could they have avoided it? Together, therefore,
they died. Imagination, which, being human, is finite and fallible, pretended
to be divine, immortal and all-powerful. Just like Caligula, who believed
himself to be above Jove, imagination became unbridledly violent and cruel,
something that Wordsworth and the earlier Romantics had not foreseen.
But this development was already clear for Rimbaud and his generation:
they had seen, besides the terror of revolutionary violence, the triumph
of the bourgeoisie and of positive thought, the ridiculing of metaphysics,
and the stupid satisfaction with which scientists, recently specialized,
declared that any vision of the All was now impossible, no matter how
capacious the mind. And this at the very time when photography enabled
the imaging of the world and eternized the fleeting moment.

The Prince of Rimbaud's "Story," that magus
of the imagination, is therefore cruel and violent: he slaughters, rapes,
burns, destroys. But again like Caligula who had his enemy the sea punished
by the whip, his acts do not have any effect on reality. Those violences,
those cruelties, take place only in the Prince's mind, that is, in his
imagination. Paradox, or rather contradiction: the poetic imagination,
made into a divinity, is at once omnipotent and totally powerless, since
real power resides now in utilitarian and scientific activities. Rimbaud
ended up refusing to live with such a contradiction.

But in general Rimbaud's French heirs and successors
were not overly bothered by the contradiction; on the contrary, they lapped
it up. Breton declared that the true poetic act is to shoot into a crowd,
but he would have despised as a complete fool whoever would have taken
him seriously. All the avant-gardes of the 20th century, not only Surrealism,
have readily accepted the violence and cruelty which characterize the
modern imagination. The philosophic culmination was the two books written
by J.-P. Sartre right before the catastrophic French defeat: L'Imagination,
Alcan, Paris, 1936, and L'Imaginaire, Gallimard, Paris, 1940. In
them we find a philosophical justification of the violent character of
the image: imagination, writes Sartre after Husserl, is always directed
toward some object, but the image is an act directed toward a non-existent
object or an absent one, taken in its bodily aspect. While perception
presents to us the object as present and existing, the image carries with
it a negation: it presents the object as absent, as not existing. Images,
according to Sartre, are essentially contradictory, since they posit themselves
in the same act by which they annihilate themselves. In short, imagination
is "the great unrealizing function of consciousness" ("la
grande fonction irréalisante de la conscience"): to exercise
the imagination our consciousness must be able to exit this world by way
of negation, and that is the way of destruction, viz. of violence. It
is a good way, however, for it is only through it, to follow Sartre, that
we may be truly free (since this world is the realm of necessity); only
in that way may we have access to another world where anything becomes
possible.

Not much later Maurice Blanchot took Sartre's notion
of imagination to an even more demential extreme. According to Blanchot
human language (la parole humaine), intimately linked to the imagination,
implies or rather presupposesan immense hecatombe, an annihilation
of the universe (Maurice Blanchot, "Littérature et le droit
à la mort", in La Part du Feu, Gallimard, 1949). By
1950, then, the habitudo ad nihil of the imagination, the image
as the nihilist's bomb of choice, was strong and well established in the
Parisian intellectual world: it was to this world that Yves Bonnefoy,
born in 1923, arrived as a young poet, and there he published his first
book, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, in 1952,
after briefly joining and quitting (in 1947) the Surrealist club.

It is worth remarking, briefly and parenthetically, that
the situation at the time was different with the poets in the English
language. A telling contrast is offered by Wallace Stevens' book of essays,
The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951). Stevens' "angel" is
an allegory both of the imagination and of reality; in his 1942 essay,
"The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," (loc. cit., page 27)
the poet gives "an incomplete definition of poetry": "It
is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals."
Stevens is as alert to modern violencereal as well as imaginaryas
he is to what is going on in French letters; at the end of the essay I
just quoted from, he has this to say about the imagination: "It is
a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is
the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems,
in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation;
and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words,
helps us live our lives." While for the French avant-gardes imagination
had to force reality into total defeat, and make anything possible,
Stevens hoped for an equilibrium of forces. Now, equilibrium is always
less easily apprehensible to the mass markets, or rather it is not as
convincing as a clear-cut triumph or defeat; as a consequence, imagination
has triumphed over reality and European artists tend to consider art as
something of the past. When the painter Anselm Kiefer was asked by a journalist
(Le Monde, Jeudi 4 Août 2005, page 20) if art still exists,
he replied, "Now anything is possible, but in truth art resides in
the real fact that very little is possible."

The modern violence of the imagination, whether in the
extreme versions or in the more balanced ones, originated in Rimbaud's
Illuminations, and "Story" can be considered as the epitome.
Concerning the "Génie" or Jinn who appears at the high
point of the story, culmination of beauty and violence, and of whom the
poet says that he was the Prince and that the Prince was he, one must
take the poet strictly at his word: the Genie was the Prince's self-image.
More precisely, the Genie was the book full of wonders narratives,
images, mysterious signs, presages, perplexities and rages, promises to
oneself which was the Prince's childhood; which is (or which used
to be) the childhood of a poet, constituting his poetic identity. It is
the kind of book which Wordsworth offers us with The Prelude, and
he was able to conclude it by saying:

what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above the frame of things

In beauty exalted, as it
is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.

There is a continuity of sense between the above lines
and the poetry of previous times. When Dante encounters Brunetto Latini,
who taught him as a child (Inferno, Canto 15), he says:

And for centuries childhood was the time when the poet
learned "come l'uom s'etterna", how one becomes immortal through
the exercise of the highest parts of the soul, so that later he may teach
this art to others. In Spinoza's formulation (Ethica, V, prop.
31, schol.), "Mens aeterna est, quatenus res sub aeternitatis specie
concipit": the mind is eternal inasmuch as it considers things from
the standpoint of eternity. This still holds true for Wordsworth. It has
held true for as long as there was some belief in eternity. In a book
by Henry Corbin (En Islam Iranien, tome II) there is the following
stanza, the final one, from an old hymn: "I come to meet my image
and my image comes to meet me She speaks to me lovingly, and
kisses me As I return from captivity " But in Rimbaud's
"Story" we see the opening chasm, and the jump into the void.
Rimbaud, who often speaks of himself as "l'enfant", "the
child," but who here calls himself "le Prince", faces the
"Génie" who is another name for his own image, his childhood
transfigured by the imagination: he finds it beautiful, full of mysterious
intimations of love and of happiness, yet irremediably unreal, radically
false. In that "essential health" consisting in lucidity and
the refusal of all illusion when it comes to the knowing of oneself, the
Prince destroys the Genie, the poet rejects the ideal images of his own
childhood; but at that very moment the poet dies as a poet. From then
on, he will be merely a man who will pass away in his palace at a normal
age. Such was, needless to say, Rimbaud's choice and refusal in actual
life.

Of those two roadsthe promise of immortality through
the labor of signs, or the violent rejection of all illusion or Lebenslüge,
of all images, and the sticking to rough, solid realitywhich shall
the poet choose? It was a cruel crossing, or rather four blind alleys,
in which Rimbaud had left French poetry, even though his many continuators
tried to avoid it by inventing ramshackle Rimbauds of conveniencea
Catholic, a proletarian, a visionary Rimbaud, or even a hoodlum, according
to their diverging ideologies. Bonnefoy, though, refuses to avoid the
cruel crossing and squarely faces the blind alleys; he invites us into
a third road, which is to say a salvation. Against his predecessors of
the previous generation, who after the death of immortality had welcomed
the violence of the imaginary, Bonnefoy rejects the one as well as the
other: immortality as well as violence.

Listen to his poem "The Branch," from the book
Ce qui fut sans lumière (Mercure de France, 1987). You may
find the themes and timbres quite reminiscent of Wordsworth'sas
far as I know it was Joseph Frank, biographer of Dostoevsky and friend
of Bonnefoy, who first insisted in the connection between the two poets,
in World Literature Today, University of Oklahoma, Summer 1979,
pages 399-405yet together with this similarity there is, of course,
a great difference, which resides in the consciousness of the long span
in between, occupied by that which Rimbaud brought into French poetry.
Note this too, that the third road, beginning with the words, "No:
I want you ," is between parentheses all the way to the end,
as if all of that, "the music of reconciliation," "la musique
savante", should be played sotto voce or con sordino.
Remark, finally, that the allegorical contents of "childhood completed,"
"l'enfance qui s'achève", is muted, held in reserve,
up to the last line.

The Branch

Branch that I gather at
the skirt of the woods
only to leave you at the end of the world,
hidden among stones, at the shelter
where the other trail begins, invisible.

(For every earthly moment
is a crossing
where, at summer's end, our shadow goes
toward its other land in the same trees,
and seldom is one back another year
to fetch again the branch with which one swayed,
absent-mindedly, the grass for a whole summer),

Branch, I think of you
now as it snows,
I see you shrunk into the lack of meaning
of a few woody knots, right where the bark
peels off, where your dark forces swell,

And I return, a shadow
on the white ground,
toward your sleep haunting my memory,
I lift you from your dream which is scattered away,
being but water interfused with light.
Then I go to where I know the earth yawns,
abruptly, among the trees,
and I hurl you as far as I can,
I hear you rebound from stone to stone.

(No: I want you
yet a moment. I go and take
the third path, which I had seen
disappear in the grass, not knowing
why I did not step into its thickets
dark indeed, and with no birdsong in the foliage.
I go, and soon I am inside a house
where I have lived long ago but whose approach
had been lost as, unaware, as life moves on,
we say a word for the eternally last time.
In one of the rooms always deserted a fire burns,
I hear it searching for the bough of the light
in the mirror of embers,
like the god who trusts he is about to create
spirit and life, in the night whose knots
are tight, infinite, labyrinthic.

Then I lay you down, quietly,
on the bed of flames,
I watch you catch fire in your sleep,
leaning down, long I hold
your hand, which is childhood completed.)